Thank you everyone for taking the time to vote. The results are set out below. There seems to have been some anomalies with the Survey Monkey system which is very disappointing as it ended up costing a lot to use and it was meant to make the voting clear, quick and without errors. We are taking this up with Survey Monkey. Hopefully however, the results are largely accurate.

We will be offering beds again in the Spring, once we have found a bullet proof way of doing it and have recovered from this offer! Sign up for our newsletter using the form on the right hand side of the page to make sure you are alerted to this and other future opportunities.

As we’ve said, the response to this offer has been completely overwhelming and we have had to devise the system for deciding who should go forward to the voting stage based on the what we feel is representative of the nominations received. The following qualifications have been used. Some Rescues qualify in more than one category:

Any Rescues with 40 or more nominations.

Breeds that have had a significant number of nomination spread across different individual Rescues eg no individual Greyhound Rescue achieved the 40+ threshold, but the breed as a whole received 108 nominations. By the same assessment, Dogue de Bordeaux, Collies, Bull Terriers, Huskies and other sled dogs, and Boxers qualify. For each of these breeds, the Rescue that achieved the highest number of nominations has been put forward to the voting stage.

We are sure that it could be argued that we could have done it a different way, but to be honest we still have a rather large number of rescues going forward to the voting stage and we should probably have applied stricter criteria. Many will be disappointed, we know, but we think we have been fair and hopefully you will think we have been too. We cannot offer any right of appeal, sorry :(

We will make another offer of beds to Rescues in the Spring, though we will need to think of a way to make it an easier and faster process than this time. Sign up to our blog newsfeed to receive notification of this and other future offers. you’ll find it on the right had side of this page.

The Rescues that are being invited to go through to the voting stage are listed below. Once we have the agreement of 80% of those listed of have not had a response after two days, we will open voting on our Facebook page. We expect voting to commence at the weekend and it will be open for three days.

We thought we’d update you on what is going on. At the current time we are contacting the Rescues that have been selected to go forward to the voting stage, to check that they want to take part. Once we have received responses from 80% of those contacted, we will open voting on our Facebook page. We will allow 2 days to receive replies from the nominated Rescues as we don’t want to drag this out any longer. Everyone who had nominated a Rescue has already been very patient.

Because the response to this has been overwhelming, there have been several consequences:

It has taken a very long time to go through the huge number of nominations (as you will have noticed) and in fact we have had to give up counting all of them. We have already spent 3 full days doing this and we can’t really afford any more time. We are, after all, trying to run a business. Instead, we were going to counted a random selection resulting in 3000 of the total of 6230 nominations being directly taken into account. However, we can no longer access all the comments on Facebook that contain nominations, so we have only been able to take 2373 nominations into account.

For those of you that are into statistics: 374 individual rescues have been recorded. We know there were more. Nominations have been received from 14 different countries, in addition to the UK. Most Rescues deal with all dogs and the breed specific rescues will take in different breeds and crosses if they think they can rehome them. 37 different breeds or breed groups have been nominated. 255 Rescues who take all types of dog have been nominated. Greyhound Rescues topped the bill at 23 different Rescues that have been nominated, but Beagle owners obviously work as a pack since the highest number of nominations for a single Rescue was for Beagle Welfare at 138.

By the way, we will have made mistakes because of the quantity of nominations that we have been trying to handle and because some people did not make it easy to understand which Rescue they were taking about. Just getting three letters or an incomplete or not quite accurate name did make it difficult to know who they were trying to nominate and that is partly why it has taken so long to get to this stage. Not that we are complaining…..,but please don’t be surprised if we haven’t get everything quite right

When we started this we did not anticipate the level of response we have had, so we needed to adjust the ‘rules’ of the offer to reflect what has happened. We

This has been quite a harrowing experience. In order to check that we were correctly recording the names and provenance of the nominated Rescues, we looked at a lot of rescue website and Facebook pages. Inevitably, you get sucked in when you see the stories of individual dogs and tears have been shed several times. It is appalling what we humans do to animals, either actively or through neglect. We are sure that we have more than 400 Rescues that have been nominated, but this is definitely the tip of the iceberg. So many people doing great things for needy animals and so many animals needing to find forever homes. It makes you wonder why there is so much need.

HOW WE SELECTED THOSE TO GO FORWARD TO THE VOTING STAGE will be detailed on a second post

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